lukewarm
by coalmine
Summary: and we wonder how you sleep at night. ienzo and reno. AU.
1. hushhush

When he was a child, he used to think that deaths were bloody as a general rule; all deaths, like in the movies: bodies mangled and mouths open in horror or pain or surprise. It didn't bother him, it was just something he came to understand as the way the world was. That was _obviously_ why everyone wanted to die peacefully in the night.

Ienzo had always wanted to die as horrifically as possible.

Maybe blown to pieces, blood and internal organs splattered up against a wall. Maybe stabbed to death and cut up into pieces and left to fester in a dumpster behind some high-class restaurant to be found the next time someone took out some unwanted foie gras. Then he would be in the news, the 6 o'clock news. **BODY OF TWENTY-SEVEN YEAR OLD MEDICAL STUDENT FOUND IN DUMPSTER** or **MEDICAL STUDENT, IENZO LAMPEL, TURNS UP IN DUMPSTER AFTER MISSING FOR THREE WEEKS**. He really didn't have a preference. But maybe they'd put up that awful picture from his driver's license, or worse, they'd Google him and find that photo that his Aunt Deborah had insisted on using on _her_ Facebook from last Thanksgiving, featuring a smiling brunette and a very distressed Ienzo with a forkful of mashed potatoes halfway to his mouth.

That would be bad.

Maybe he'd join Facebook just for that: to have a good picture on the news when he died. That might just be worth giving up his boycott of useless 'networking' websites.

He wasn't suicidal; it was just something he thought about.

A lot.

It wasn't an obsession; it was... a healthy, normal, interest and sign of an active imagination.

He just wanted people to notice him so he could mock them to their faces. Yeah. That was it. **Right**.

These are the things that Ienzo tells himself. Some people have a hobby of sailing, or breeding world class horses, or doing woodwork. Ienzo is a pathological liar - that is his hobby - with a PHD in denial.

This is _okay_, this is _normal_.

These are the things that Ienzo Lampel - twenty-seven, mother gone, father gone, almost living in a hospital storeroom but for the few days he spends with his aunt a week, hesitating to pass a stick-up-his-ass doctor a scalpel when he asks for a scalpel because he's debating just stabbing himself instead - tells himself every day.


	2. pick up your glass

How can you tell if a shadow has a shadow? When you're used to living in the darkness, everything is shadow. Shadows fight for the right to belong to someone – for fleeting seconds they **_are_** - and they strive for this; their purpose.

But Ienzo has always been content sitting in the shadows and covering his eyes. So when he finds himself with a shadow of his own, he's understandably shocked. It's a mistake. He does not shine, thus he has no shadow, so why would this neon glow be following him?

He's still invisible, but the redheaded patient is persistent, and he can feel those blue eyes picking at his scrubs as he walks by, riffling through his hair. There's breath on his cheek, but looking up just shows the other man to be in bed, right where Ienzo had left him.

This is his two hundred and eighteenth patient. Ienzo will remember him, too, but it won't mean anything. It never means anything; just another ID number, just another body with a social security number; another person to buzz his beeper incessantly.

And as soon as he hears that drawl – heavy Irish but so Americanized the seams are barely visible, lilting, and careless, teasing – he rolls his eyes and briefly shakes the offered hand out of inherent politeness. "Get back in bed, Mr. Thomas."


	3. blood on your lips

With his arms raised he's like an exotic bird on a white picket fence: out of place – ridiculously so. His red hair is wild, as usual, brushing the middle of his neck, and he's dressed like the city kid he is at heart, right down to the crumbling Chuck Taylors' – high tops, signature black with red laces – on his feet and up to the newsboy cap perched at an angle on his head that Ienzo knows is anything but practical. But Reno Thomas has never been the image of practicality.

Reno's twenty-seven, not old – he's got a whole life in front of him. Yet it makes Ienzo sick to know he's only a year younger than this man wading through thigh-high snow drifts with eyes as old as time.

Ienzo's perched in the drivers' seat of his old white Ford Taurus, half in, half out like he can't decide whether to get out and truly embrace the fresh air practically making him salivate, or to stay in the Taurus, where at least there's temperature control. It's the side of the road but no cars come out this way, no cars ever come out this way.

But Ienzo's so stupid for coming this far out, this far away from a hospital, from anyone that could help them if anything went wrong. He's trained, of course he's trained, but he doesn't have what he needs, and is not sure he'd be able to improvise. Not with a life on the line. But Reno's got a silver tongue and a silver spoon all tucked in neatly in that mouth of his, and this isn't the first time this has happened. Reno wants to go places, see places, he argues, something more than these hospital walls. Reno wants to go where people don't know he's dying, but he is, and a change of scenery won't change that.

It's a field. Simply a field: green and pregnant with flowers in the spring, waving tall and lazy in the summer, glowing golden in the fall, and a sheet of white crystal in the winter. All fields are like this, but Reno wanted to go to this one, this one field. He won't tell Ienzo why, and Ienzo won't ask.

And Reno's saying, "walk with me", and the air's begging, _walk in me_, and Ienzo tells himself it's not right to directly disobey a spirit of the Earth. He's never cared before - staring at the world from a hospital window with a hand in the pocket of his scrubs, the other clutching cheap Styrofoam because he couldn't be bothered to bring in his own mug, because he keeps telling himself it's not going to be permanent - and he wonders why he cares now. His other side, his sensible side, tells him it doesn't matter, to just get out there and make sure Mr. Thomas doesn't kill himself.

Not that Mr. Thomas would do such a thing; the Residents say he's only got a while left.

Ienzo would have asked if 'a while' meant two weeks, of if 'a while' meant a year. Reno had just given them his crooked smile – but it was bitter, Ienzo could tell after countless days (weeks, months) dealing with the man – and said, "Damn, I coulda told you that, hurts like a bitch when I breathe." Ienzo had fidgeted and stood with his mouth half open in protest as they'd given him another dose of Vicodin. Reno had swallowed it dry without a word.

A clump of snow is hitting the windshield of the Taurus and exploding like a fireworks show, the color sucked dry. Ienzo jumps, he can't help it, and can barely catch sight of his somberly dressed charge – even though all the black makes Reno's hair almost glow, Ienzo still thinks it's like he's mourning his death before it happens, but he'd never say that out loud – as he goes stumbling from the vehicle, muttering curses.

He rubs the aching spot on the back of his head and suddenly this place has lost it's magic. It's cold, and it's wet. Ienzo slams his hand on the top of the car, mentally wincing at the sting of cold ice on bare skin – freeze burn, and bellows, "Mr. Thomas, get in the car! We're going back, now!"

From where he's standing, he can hear Reno's laugh, high and dry and rasping and so old. But he's not old, just a year older than Ienzo himself. Ienzo ignores it and ducks inside the car again, and his hand finds the horn this time. It screams across the distance, and now Reno's laughs shake his body and he's bending over, gasping for air. Reno's coughs have almost become background noise by now; he never stops, almost never.

Gasping for air. Ienzo stares but doesn't look, doesn't realize until Reno's hat falls off, and it's so stark against the snow, black on white. Ienzo realizes and swears and trips on his way out of the car again. He rushes to Reno's side and now the older man – one year, only one year – is on his knees and the coughs don't stop.

The blood in the snow, speckling Reno's sneakers, is bright red like his hair, just like his hair. Ienzo feels sick and wonders again, and not for the last time, why he ever let himself get wrapped into this. He has decided he doesn't want to watch this man die. And so he stands there, wiping blood off the redhead's hands with a tissue or two and pressing a tissue or three to the man's mouth. He feels guilty when the first coherent thought racing through his mind is that tuberculosis is contagious, and that he doesn't want to die. Not like this. Not like Reno. Not at twenty-seven.

"You have blood on your lips," he hears himself saying, tinny and distant and almost casual, looking up at the other as he begins to regain control, breathing in gasps now, but at least he's not choking on the air. No, not on air so pure as this.

Reno smiles - no, he smirks, Reno's smile is too devious and bloodstained to be just a smile – and leans in close enough that Ienzo can smell the blood on his breath - this hot, sweet, metallic tang, "I know. D'you want a taste?"


	4. because it's everything

Fitness was never his strong point. He was healthy, of course he was healthy, it would have been too hypocritical for him not to be. But for some reason the stairs seemed endless.

It's only three flights, and Ienzo takes them all the time. He tells people it's because he likes the extra exercise. This is a lie. Everything is a lie. Ienzo takes the stairs to be alone, to not have to make small talk at and in the elevator. These people are so fake; each sitting happily in their little platinum plated bubbles of prestige and 'intellect'. He hates it.

But today the stairs never come to the door, and he climbs and climbs and climbs. He's sweating, breath coming in great gasps as he starts to run, tripping on a step and catching himself on an open palm. It stings, but he goes on, and it comes as a shock when he realizes he's screaming, choking on his own voice. He stumbles again, and lands on his elbows on the platform, face in his hands as he trembles with the force of his sobs. Distantly, he wonders if he's bleeding.

An exhausted hand touches his shoulder, he can feel the weariness through his scrubs, and he knows without looking up that it's Reno. It's always Reno; he doesn't know why that's surprising.

Except for maybe the fact that Reno couldn't even walk down the hall this morning, and he still looks pale, and only now does Ienzo register that he's shaking almost as much as he is.

"I'm supposed to be your doctor," he gasps out. He won't look at him. Reno just shakes his head and pulls him up, holding his hand as he leads him up the stairs, his other clenched white-knuckled on the railing. Ienzo hadn't gotten farther than the first floor.


	5. sleepless cold nights

"Hey, Ienzo, how're you?" He sounds genuinely interested. Reno always sounds interested – he loves people, loves to hear them talk. Reno talks without restraints – without a filter – and with his hands, like he's painting.

_El-Shaddai_, he prays, _give me strength_.

Ienzo doesn't say a word, just glances at him quickly before looking away. He dashes to open the windows, to have something to do with his hands. Reno is calling his name, but he ignores it, he ignores him, clenching his jaw and attempting to convert it to white noise. And he fails. He does that a lot lately. He can't talk to him, and he won't talk to him.

_Jehova-Tsidkenu_, he whispers, _don't make me lie_.

Reno talks to fill the silence; he sounds worried, but it's masked by his usual joviality, and Ienzo marvels at his accent the same way he did the first time Reno opened his mouth. But his voice colors the air sour – bitter – and cold. Like bad coffee left on a windowsill. He talks faster, louder, and Ienzo turns on the TV to Discovery Science. His hand is clenching the remote as if for dear life, and suddenly, as if slapped, he drops it at the foot of Reno's bed and goes to turn the bathroom light off, but Reno catches his wrist as he reaches for the switch. When had he even gotten out of bed?

_Jehova-Jireh_, he pleads, _don't let him hurt himself_.

"Don't ignore me, Ienzo." Reno's hand is burning up, branding the outline of four fingers and a thumb into Ienzo's skin, and he looks irritated and feverish; in a second he'll be pleading for Vicodin. It's been a bad week.

_Jehova-Ropheka_, he cries, _take his pain away_.

He doesn't answer, just blinks up at him. _Detach, let go; let him go, let him go._ This is his mantra, this is his protection. Reno's the one that let's go first, sweaty fingers slipping on skin – _pressed up close and breathing his breath and in too deep_ - wheezing and sinking to his knees. He sounds scared, Reno never sounds scared. "Don't leave me alone… please, Zoe, please..."

Nobody calls him Zoe. Reno is nobody. _Let go_.

_El-Elyon_ - he pauses in his prayer to get the man off the floor and back into bed, to numb him some more against the burning, to wait for him to drift back into a medicated sleep where he can tell by the twitching of Reno's spider fingers that the nightmares have already begun – _save this man_.

It's only until he's sure his patient is asleep that he dares to speak, manages to coax dusty words from the caverns of his throat like ancient tomes, awkward and foreign on a usually eloquent tongue. He's so close he can feel Reno's breathe on his neck, and he barely brushes quivering lips against the man's forehead. He doesn't know why he bothered, Ienzo doesn't believe in God.

"No, Reno, you're the one leaving me."


	6. ceremony by leslie marmon silko

Ienzo cries because everything is changing. Things always change, for that's the way of the world, and he should know this, remembering mama sitting on the porch steps silent as she caresses a leaf bright like rust.

But mama is gone, and the porch steps crumbled and were eaten away by sand and termites years ago.

He cries without knowing he is, until dark spots appear on headlines. Touching his face, he pulls his hand away to stare at gleaming fingertips. He can't taste the saline as it seeps into the corners of his lips; this has become the taste of his dusks and dawns, the constant flavor of his week.

Seventeen days ago they had been at Olive Garden, Ienzo rolling his eyes as Reno slipped a soup spoon up his sleeve with a wink, muttering something about them being the most perfect soup spoons in creation. Fourteen days ago Reno couldn't even get out of bed. He had always known that Reno was dying – terminal, that's what it means – but Reno is dying.


	7. hello, disease

The doctors gave Reno six months to live. It's been eight, and for some reason, Ienzo can't be thankful, and he can't find comfort in this knowledge.

Six months is only half a year, and a whole half a year. You get caught up in it. You realize just how temperamental it is, and how much things can change. You get used to doing the same thing day after day, and Ienzo is a creature of habit. He enjoys predictability, enjoys knowing just what's going to happen, and enjoys being prepared.

And when Reno had urged him to go home the night before and get some real sleep – joked that he knew Ienzo was obsessed with him but he didn't need to be the first thing Ienzo sees when he wakes up – he had gone. Hospital chairs were not comfortable and he knew Reno worried, because Reno cared about people. Reno cared about Ienzo, so Ienzo had gone.

It had been only a small change in his schedule, and he knows once he gets back to work things will fall back into place. His feet know their way through the halls without hesitation, and he repeats hollow greetings that swirl about him like dead leaves as he hefts his bag further up on his shoulder.

Room 206, 207, 208.

The fact that the door's open is unexpected, but he shakes the minor annoyance off, uselessly, as two female voices drift towards him.

This is wrong.

"Ienzo!"

They've noticed him finally, or maybe he's only just noticed them, two nurses he knows and doesn't know. Gillian – aged forty-six, a wife for twenty years and a mother to two – is the first to see him standing there. There's no sympathy there, just a hint of pity, because she's seen this all the time. She sees this all the time. But all the sympathy that is lacking on Gillian's face is present on Aeris' – a newer nurse, aged twenty-nine, and the youngest cat lady he knew – and he hates it. He shouldn't need their emotions, he doesn't, really, he's waiting to feel sorry for himself.

His head knows, but his heart is blocking it out.

The bag on his shoulder drops to the floor with a muffled thud – _my thermos_, he thinks vaguely, _I hope it doesn't leak_ – and he brushes past them, ignoring their echoes of _Ienzo, wait, please, Ienzo, please wait_.

Reno's bed is empty, the sheets in a heap on the floor. This is wrong.

He flings open the closet, "Where is he? He's not scheduled for any tests today!"

He tears open the bathroom door, "Where is he? He can't just walk about unsupervised, despite whatever I'm sure he told you!"

He rips the shower curtain back and it's rod breaks and clatters into the tub with a din, "Where is he?!"

He can't hear himself screaming.

"Mr. Thomas told us not to call you, said you'd be sleeping…" Aeris says carefully, and it's a wonder she can still speak, choking on her own emotion that he almost wants to reach out and grab and crumble into tiny glittering pieces.

"Where is he?"

"We did all we could, Ienzo…"

"Where is he?"

"He was perfectly comfortable, we made sure of that."

"Shut up! Where is –"

"Ienzo Lampel, control yourself," Gillian's voice cuts him off, and he realizes then that he's crying; he can taste and he's breathing it in and it's coating his skin, this desperation, "Reno Thomas passed away early this morning. His lungs finally gave in, but he was so heavily medicated he couldn't feel a thing. There was nothing more we could have done for him, I'm sure you know he didn't have much longer, especially after he became bedridden, and he requested for us not to attempt anything. If you're done here, I would suggest you go complete the paperwork waiting for you."

Aeris lays a hand on his shoulder, but he doesn't flinch, doesn't pull away, and her voice is soft, "I'm sorry, Ienzo, I know you were friends."

"Me? Who the hell even dies of tuberculosis anymore? He was a drunkard and a whore." His voice is as cold as he can make it, and there is no point in wiping the tears away when more come to wash the others away, and he's not sure if he's really breathing, "He died alone, he had no friends, no family. At least I don't have to wait any longer, maybe I can finally complete a days' work."

These are the things that Ienzo tells himself, but Reno had never been as alive as he was in that one moment, and Ienzo is the one who's dead and alone.


	8. drought

He is never going back to the hospital. They can't make him go back to that place. He won't go back, he can't go back.

Instead he drives off, back to the field Reno had begged Ienzo to drive him to, right off the highway. But it's summer now and it looks so different: brown-green and dry and brittle. But it doesn't stop him from wrestling with his seatbelt and toppling out of the car. It smells like dust, it hurts his lungs.

Ienzo wishes for winter, hands hanging limply at his sides as an eighteen-wheeler blares its horn at him. It's easy to ignore things when they don't exist in your world. And right now that was the only thing that mattered. As far as he was concerned, he wasn't standing on the side of the highway looking like the world had just ended. And maybe it had.

He's thinking, he hasn't stopped thinking since he'd left the hospital.

So he climbs over the guard-rail and staggers down the incline. He has dust in his lungs, he's sure, stirred up by his own descent and it makes it hard to breath. It reminds him of- No.

It doesn't remind him of anyone. It doesn't remind him of anything.

The grass has grown tall and been sucked dry, a field of gold and brown and yellow-green. It catches his skin as he drifts by, skeleton fingers coaxing, taunting, calling him back. Once upon a time… It makes him sick – for a second he glimpses red and it makes him sick. And it's even harder to breath when he starts running. Maybe it's the dust, or maybe it's his chest. Maybe it's not important. Now they finally had something besides loneliness in common.

That's why it's hard to stop running.

That's why it's so hard to stop when Reno runs past him and continues ahead of him, turning about so he's running backwards, shrugging his shoulders, palms open.

That's why it's hard to stop when he can hear him call back, "I'm sorry, man, but I gotta go! See you later, alright?"

Reno is waving now, both arms high and wild in the air, fingers splayed. He's outgrown the white picket fence of the world, and Ienzo knows this. He could have said so himself from the start.

That's why it's hard when Reno smiles and Ienzo knows he was never really there that summer in the field to begin with.

His head is pounding, and the metallic, pitched, spikes of noise he's placed next to the dull thrum-thrumming of his own heartbeat flat line.

And it's so hard.


	9. and the circles are squares

"Do you believe in life?"

He thought that she had been asleep not seconds ago, and so he replies mechanically, voice distant, "What?"

"Do you be-_lieve_," she draws the word out just like that, quivering fingers clutching at the starched sheets in a show of her impatience, "in life."

"Well... yes. I'm... alive after all. We are alive. We're speaking and that's an indicator that we are... most definitely living, breathing, human beings."

"What abou-"

"Where are these questions coming from?"

"Am I not allowed to ask questions?"

The way she doesn't miss a beat makes him stop for longer than he really wants to - trumped by a mere child - and he takes a step back to finally meet the eyes he's been avoiding since entering the room. It's easier to pretend that things are as close to content as they could be, even though it's sick to imagine a sleeping Reno - vibrant despite the gauntness in his face and the stark, biting light of the room - in place of a quiet patient. But it's easier that way, and he knows he's a coward for his inability to move on, selfish for the way he clings to little moments. Ienzo knows it's a test of his own strength, so he pushes on, pen at the next spot on his list.

"Are you on any drugs?"

"Why? Are you a nark?"

"It's a procedure question," he flips back a page to check the name at the top of his forms, "Selphie. One that I am to ask all new - conscious -patients that have exhibited signs of drug abuse. We need to know how to best treat you."

Those brown eyes are skeptical, and the girl looks towards the window with its half-drawn curtains, sinking back into the bed with a sigh. She's silent after that, though it's not a relief as it might have been months ago. Now it's stifling and awkward, and there is a level of distance and impersonality that makes him uncomfortable. Not that he would say, not that she would know, but it's still there.

He curses Reno silently then, as he does at least once a day, and apologizes within the minute.

Even though it's all Reno's fault.


End file.
